Don't Mess With Minnesotans, or Other Prairie People
Image from Substack.com
Minneapolis may be the worst city in the U.S. for the Trumpers to try to muscle into submission. The TV and radio media market reaches into the Dakotas, Iowa and Wisconsin. People throughout the region are getting the full brunt of the deadly thugishness. Not just on national media but supercharged by local radio and TV stations and local newspapers.
And while many people in this media market reliably have voted Republican, there’s a common independent prairie heritage that crosses state lines. It’s where the early 20th century progressive movement was born. Where until recently the independent Farmer-Labor Party regularly elected its candidates. Where the Scandinavian culture of its pioneers still has a healthy presence.
North Dakota, for instance, has a state bank and has socialized it grain management and pricing. Both so popular the Republican dominated state legislature would never consider axing them.
Minnesota as a Political Pressure Point
A leading Republican candidate for governor of Minnesota dropped out of the race expressly because of how the Trump White House was weaponizing immigration enforcement.
South Dakota Republican Congressman Dusty Johnson, also a candidate for governor in his state, called for deescalation and a thorough investigation.
They know Republicans are likely to pay a steep price in prairie country.
The message across the region seems emphatic. Don’t mess with Minnesota. The White House picked the wrong target here. “Minnesota nice,” does not translate into Minnesota weak.
Another unfathomable decision from the White House:
If you went to Hollywood’s Central Casting to recruit people to play the parts of thugs and jackboots, you could hardly do better than many of the ICE enforcers showing up on our screens. How could Trump, who’s well known for his bias for appointing beautiful people, have missed this? Many ICE officers would look guilty of abuse even if they were just directing traffic.
Surveillance and the Quiet Erosion of Voting Rights
And how about this for another White House unforced error: Trump’s attorney general offering to de-escalate enforcement if the state would hand over its registered voting list to Trump’s White House.
In case you’re wondering, the reason Trump is intent on securing state voter lists is to earmark all the potential non-Republican voters they can find excuses for to remove from the list or question their legitimacy. How? Non-matching signatures, changed addresses, women’s names changed through marriage or divorce. And so on. Such errors are common and easily remedied by election officials not intent on rigging the vote.
Not only are current lists red meat for rigging, the lists are not static. Between now and November some people on the lists will die, some will move, some with get married or divorced prompting name changes. Professional election officials anticipate these changes and account for them. But vote riggers will see opportunities to flag names that change and unmatched signatures as opportunities for challenge, particularly if those names belong to people with a history of voting for Democrats.
And one more way the voting lists can and likely would be abused: by placing protestors on a domestic terrorist list. That’s why ICE is busy taking photos of protestors and license plates on cars at protest sites.
Last week, a masked ICE agent warned a woman filming their activities in Portland, Maine that her information would be entered into a “nice little database” that would label her a domestic terrorist. Once there, like all others whom the White House would prefer not vote, she likely would be handed a “provisional” ballot at her polling place, and therefore, quietly disenfranchised.
By injecting voting lists into the issue of immigration, the White House elevated its rigging plans to major media scrutiny. How stupid is that? How fortunate we all are that it happened.
It’s critically important for states to keep voting control, as the Constitution requires, and just as important that Americans keep following ICE into the streets, no matter where ICE shows up.
With warning whistles at the ready.
Comments? Criticism? Contact Joe Rothstein at jrothstein@rothstein.net
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